In the previous article I started analyzing the platform balance for a MOBA game that supports multiple platforms and allows players on PC and PlayStation 4 i.e. to play together in the same match.

Looking at the summary statistics on platform distribution we could not find any obvious disbalance issues. Now I am going to continue the research, but only for PvP mode from now.

First it makes sense to start looking at the platform distribution within teams over a time period (each column below is a day of observation):

This sample report shows data for 5 time intervals, and you can see that most team combinations are 0-5 (0 PCs and 5 PlayStation 4), following by 1-4 (1 PCs and 4 PlayStation 4) and so on.

The next question you should ask what is the win rate for each platform combination in teams:

Ok, the win rate grows with the number of PC players in a match, but as you can see above, the number of games with PC platforms exceeding PS4 platforms in a team is small, so the matchmaking already tries to balance the PC advantage (that’s itself interesting to investigate in detail).

When you know how the platforms are distributed in teams, it is interesting to know which teams/platforms combinations appear in matches:

In this example data set, 0-5/0-5 means a match where 5 players on PlayStation 4 play with another team of 5 players on PlayStation 4.

Fortunately (obviously for PS4 players), the number of 5-0/0-5 matches is low. Let’s double check and look at the win rate for team/platform combinations right now:

Here we can see confirmation (the view shows the win rate of the first team in PC-PS4/PC-PS4 combination) that the PC platform has some advantage. 0-5/5-0 means that 5 PS4 players has the win rate about 40% when they play with 5 PC players. 1-4/0-5 and 1-4/1-4 is about 50% as expected.

Why does one platform have advantage over another? It is a very interesting question, and the answer may have nothing related to the platform and its mechanics itself. I will try to go deeper in further posts.